Trace! is a free
program that checks documents and e-mails for possibly sensitive items.
These could be Social Security numbers, profanity, racial comments and
items that may violate privacy laws.

It's from Workshare (www.workshare.com),
a British company. Trace! generates a report about possibly dangerous
comments; a second program, called Protect, is sold for $30 and stops
questionable documents from going out.

You can click on a whole folder, such as My
Documents, a folder usually found on the Windows desktop, and Trace!
will go through all its files. It can even see if something was blacked
out -- censored or changed. One of the characteristics of any document
created with Microsoft Office -- including spreadsheets and PowerPoint
presentations -- is that the changes are hidden, but the original is
still preserved. The changes are even preserved with the time, date and
source.

How long does all this take? We took a 135k
folder with three Microsoft Word documents; Trace! went through them and
generated a report in 15 seconds. It found no security problems. We then
created a document with Social Security numbers and profanity (of
course, we had to use a dictionary to find those words) and Trace!
flagged them immediately.

Trace! can be activated just for particular
documents or left in an "always on" state. Protect strips out sensitive
material before it can be sent. This is tricky, of course, because
sometimes you want a colleague or client to see information that might
be deemed sensitive. So it goes back to that old World War II slogan
that "Loose Lips Sink Ships": Think about what you're saying. You could
violate some laws.

Muvee Movie

This is the best movie- and slideshow-making
program we've ever come across, and the reason is it's simple.

Muvee autoProducer is what you would call a
no-brainer. It does not have all the features of most of the movie
editing programs on the market. But the trouble with those programs is
it takes weeks of learning to use those features; Muvee takes less than
a minute.

Open the program and click on the slide and
video files you want to make into a movie. Click to add some music.
Click to add a "style." You're done.

There are dozens of "style" setups to choose
from, and these are the key to making a quick and easy movie. "Birthday
Party," for example, adds frames of balloons and party hats. "Velvet"
creates a smooth, slow-paced movie. "Music Video" creates an up-tempo
style with fast cuts timed to the music's beat. A child's template
called "Comic Book" outlines people and objects in black and adds
animated borders.

Muvee is $70 from Muvee Technologies (www.muvee.com).
The child's package is an additional $20, and there are other special
packages, such as "Wedding" and "Christmas." A free version on the Web
site lets you create brief movies and save them as e-mail. When you
launch it, it automatically scans you computer for video, music and
pictures, and creates a Muvee; it then asks you if you want to change
anything. This is a fun thing to try.

Internuts

·
www.fundrace.org: Find out how much your neighbors gave to political
candidates and parties. You type in an address and ZIP code, or a
person's name, and up comes a list of political contributions for that
neighborhood. You also get each neighbor's occupation. The address can
be anywhere in the United States. Interesting stuff.

·
www.sudokufun.com: Lots of puzzles from the new craze for Japanese
number games. "Sudoku" is Japanese for "single number." The puzzles here
change every few minutes.

·
www.vggallery.com: 2,194 works by Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh.
(And to think he sold only two.) Site is endorsed by the Van Gogh museum
in Amsterdam.

Making calls through the Internet is very
cheap indeed, and makes one wonder what kind of future traditional phone
companies have. The author goes through many telephone alternatives, and
most interesting of all, goes through his own phone bill. He points out
that much of a normal telephone bill is taxes, which you don't get with
Internet phoning. In his case, half the bill was taxes and fees. There
were a dozen lines of add-ons, including long-distance service, never
used. (Phone companies charge you for long distance even if you don't
make any long-distance calls.)

It's all kind of fascinating, and perhaps
most interesting of all is you can read a lot of it without buying the
book: O'Reilly Press makes sample chapters of all its books available on
its Web site.